On demand: "The Ugly Stepsister"

Emilie Blichfeldt's The Ugly Stepsister - which earned a leftfield yet deserved Oscar nomination last month for Best Make-Up and Hairstyling - has the air of a Whose Line Is It Anyway? audience suggestion: it's the Nordic film industries revisiting the Cinderella legend after the manner of Nicolas Winding Refn, which means lurid period imagery, an electronic score and a desire to revel in the artistic freedoms provided by an 18 certificate. More grisly than Disney, vastly more perverse than Wicked, it charges full-pelt into Angela Carter territory on horseback, confident in the knowledge that there are many more young women who self-identify as ugly than there are those who see themselves as flaxen-haired princesses. Blichfeldt reframes this story through the twin prisms of class and gender. Our heroine Elvira (Lea Myren) is a gawky brunette with zits and braces whose social-climbing mother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) has married into the aristocracy for a financial protection that disappears overnight after her aging husband expires at the dinner table. Now Rebekka needs a new arrangement, having three girls to raise singlehandedly: the aforementioned Elvira, her sensible, tomboyish sister Alma (Flo Fagerli) and inherited stepdaughter Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess), the movie's Cinderella equivalent, who comes to battle with Elvira for the attentions, hand and dowry of the inevitably syphilitic local Prince (Isac Calmroth). As this sometime bedtime story is rerouted towards a new, unhappy ending, Blichfeldt is revealed as a costume-drama fiend who's studied everything from Picnic at Hanging Rock to TV's The Great and - more significantly - grasped what might still be done within this enduringly popular genre to overturn the status quo. She's also, one notes, a Lars von Trier acolyte ready to pile provocation atop provocation, seeking to make us wince and squirm; the caveat is that even her film's more outlandish gestures retain some correspondence with regrettable reality.

The girls' dual pursuit of the Prince encompasses facial reconstruction surgery undertaken by a cokehead sawbones who advertises his services with the slogan "Beauty is Pain"; crash diets; gropey, leery men; the fairytale equivalent of a training montage, as Elvira is coached through the rituals of ladyhood by one Miss Kronenberg (wink wink); and, amid a clutch of unsparing close-ups of vulnerable body parts, some business with eyes and needles and blades and toes you may well prefer to look away from. In the central role, Myren proves as resilient as the shapeshifting young leads of Julia Ducorneau's recent causes célèbres: she's obliged to leave her vanity in her trailer along with her phone, but nothing phases her, she heals and transforms quickly and effectively - albeit under considerable narrative duress - and she understands exactly what this story is targeting. She lands some form of reward in being remodelled as Sydney Sweeney heading into the Prince's ball, but then her hair begins to come out in clumps (swings and roundabouts), and she winds up having a vast tapeworm extracted from her in a grand grossout finale that recalls a conjuror's showstopping trick: ta-da! Her character is from first to last a victim of the beauty regime, but the actress becomes an active conspirator in Blichfeldt's efforts to undermine the patriarchy (and those sisters who still seek to uphold its strictures). If the latter's methods lean, sometimes slide towards the sensational, it is at least the kind of sensationalism that makes for grabby, poppy cinema, and sensationalism in the service of something greater than mere titillation, which wasn't precisely the case with last year's awards-season talking point The Substance (and I also gather isn't quite the case with Emerald Fennell's current charttopping hatewatch "Wuthering Heights"). Were it not for that prohibitive certificate and occasional flashes of explicit sex (how Scandinavian of her), you could well imagine teachers rolling in those big tellies that aren't currently booked out to show Adolescence to teenage boys so as to screen Blichfeldt's film to thoughtful fifth-form girls. Don't live your life like this, those educators might say beforehand by way of supportive context; the rewards cannot be worth all this suffering.

The Ugly Stepsister is currently available to rent via Prime Video, and will be released on Blu-ray through Second Sight on Monday 23rd.